Ophthalmology Robot Restores Near-Blind Eye in 3 Minutes with Micron Precision

After 19 years of dedicated research, a team at the Eye Center of Zhejiang Provincial People's Hospital has successfully translated an ophthalmology surgical robot into clinical practice. In July 2023, they achieved a milestone by performing Asia's first clinical surgery with this robotic system.

The patient was a 61-year-old woman, identified as Aunt Wang, whose left eye was nearly blind due to macular hemorrhage. The robot minimized the surgeon's hand tremors to one-tenth of their natural amplitude, with a tremor-filtering precision of 10 microns. It then guided a 100-micron-diameter needle through the outer layer of the macular retina, maintaining an error of less than 5 microns, and completed the injection in only 3 minutes.

This level of precision is critical for subretinal injections, which require extraordinary steadiness and would be extremely challenging manually. To date, the team has performed 32 such macular subretinal injection procedures. The success not only demonstrates the robot's reliability but also opens new possibilities for treating severe retinal diseases that were previously inoperable or high-risk. It represents a major advancement in minimally invasive eye surgery and could pave the way for broader adoption of robotic systems in ophthalmology.